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What are the top 10 rarest vintage computer bits you own?

I have a small collection of vintage computers and video game systems. You can see most of them in a video at the bottom of my website. www.theageofgaming.com


I have just recently picked up my first Altair 8800a. Wow!! it is a beautiful machine !!!

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I have a small collection of vintage computers and video game systems.

Wow, that was quite a collection. As more of a user than a collector, it made me sad though to see all those computers locked away in their boxes. :) I needed to do some alignment on a disk drive the other day and the only disk i had that i felt would be appropriate to use for the alignment would be a factory manufactured one, so i opened a sealed box of software (albiet just a copy of 'kidwriter') and i could hear the angry sound of collectors in the back of my head screaming...
 
After looking at some of the examples here, I am hardly worthy.

But still... I have a working Zenith Z-161 portable, comparable to a Compaq. Has an amber screen and a whopping 320K of ram. Also have two Epson computers; a QX-10 and QX-16. The monitor on the former stopped working a few months back, and the monitor on the latter hasn't worked for a while. A couple months ago (could sworn I remembered replacing a fuse on the -16) I opened up the QX-16, and had no idea what I was looking at. Time to find online documentation, if it still exists.

Also have a Zenith MiniSport, but the LCD isn't working. Alas, neither is the external CGA link these days either. It boots, but these days I can't tell what's going on.
 
Wow, that was quite a collection. As more of a user than a collector, it made me sad though to see all those computers locked away in their boxes. :)

Yeah, it looks like it would be a pain in the ass to play with one of those things. First, you'd have to take down the individual cartridge boxes, then take the box down, then unpack it, connect it and plug it in. Then, when you're finished, you'd have to pack it all up, put it up on the shelf and put the cartridge boxes back in front of it. I'm tired just thinking about it. Awesome collection though - and amazing condition of the original boxes.

I had to open three unopened shrink-wrapped software boxes and I heard those angry collectors in the back of my head too. But I did it very carefully, slicing the shrink wrap at the opening, so that I could remove the software while leaving the shrink wrap on the box. The angry collector shrieks in my head settled down to an angry murmur. :D
 
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Did anyone mention Holborn yet? :D
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Funny, I've got the Dolch LAM3250 logic analyser and eprom eraser too
which Holborn used to debug their hardware and software.
Rare? Probably not... But nice to have with that history in mind.

I do also have a small Philbrick Analog computer, if you may call that a computer.

Another weird thing is my National Starplex with a 4004 in the programmer part.

Furthermore I have a few Anita calculators which are hybrid machines.
Tubes, transistors and diodes... The first machines like the MK8 were
decimal machines but the later like the MK12 did actually count in a binary way.
Look here on youtube if you want to know how it works...

I would love to have a computer which works with tubes once.
Those changes are quite low to find these. So The Anita's fill in that place.
 
Did anyone mention Holborn yet? :D
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Wow, that's neat. I was wondering why I never saw one before - it's a Dutch computer. I usually only focus on North American computers.

Nice design - screen at eye height and no messy cords attaching the monitor. I saw other pictures of this thing with (yellowed) beige keys. Yours is nicer with black keys.
 
Do you just have one amplifier module or a more complete setup?
Dwight

I have this small 19" module... It is just a box with a few opamps of course...
http://www.philbrickarchive.org/rp-4-68.htm

This is my module documented at the Philbrick archive:
http://www.philbrickarchive.org/rp-f_operational_manifold_and_memory-wire_board.pdf
Lots of pluggable resistors, capacitors and transistors as well... But not a big system...

I have some fun idea's to do with it... Maybe next winter :)
 
I have this small 19" module... It is just a box with a few opamps of course...
http://www.philbrickarchive.org/rp-4-68.htm

This is my module documented at the Philbrick archive:
http://www.philbrickarchive.org/rp-f_operational_manifold_and_memory-wire_board.pdf
Lots of pluggable resistors, capacitors and transistors as well... But not a big system...

I have some fun idea's to do with it... Maybe next winter :)

Ha, I was thinking it was one of the older two tube modules. It is a cool unit. Philbrick makes high quality stuff.
What pluging modules do you have for the top positions?
Dwight
 
Ha, I was thinking it was one of the older two tube modules. It is a cool unit.
Philbrick makes high quality stuff. What pluging modules do you have for the top positions? Dwight

Unfortunately I don't have modules in the top side. There were some
special modules for it. I love to find these once...
 
Unfortunately I don't have modules in the top side. There were some
special modules for it. I love to find these once...

The one to look for is the multiply/divide. The curve fitting diode units would work as well but you'd spend most of your time adjusting them.
Dwight
 
no idea how rare...
... but these are what I have

1. IBM pc/server 500 with P/390 board (1995 is this vintage?)
2. IBM model 10 card punch
3. SWTPC CT64 VDU
4. EIA TR10 Analog Computer (is this a computer)
5. SWTPC Video Boards (plus late model SS50 machines. Whilst these are not as nice as the early machines I think only a few survive.
6. HP7510 Film Recorder.

I keep hoping to get a CT64 one day. I've only seen them sold with other SWTPC equipment I already have.
 
So, here is my list :

1) ETH / Modula Systems Lilith : functional until 3 years ago, need to get it running again.
Used as a basis to build my Lilith emulator "Emulith"
These have always been rare, only several hunderd produced.
Survivors : around 10 units I know about. Currently running : none that I know of.
( BTW Bear : in the meantime I obtained a diskimage that could help you getting yours running again. )
2) Pascal Microengine. Rare ? I truely don't know.
3) Datapoint 2200 with Floppy & Cartridge disk drive. Why are these rare ? They once were everywhere...
4) Cogar / Singer / ICL 1501. A 1973 personal computer. Looking for a cartridge disk controller for these. Used to be quite common.
5) Philips P856 : 70's 16 bit TTL computer on 74181 basis. Sort of PDP11 class machine, more powerfull, more complex, very much less software.
6) Philips P854 : As above, reimplemented on AMD2901 basis.
7) Data General MP/200 : AMD2901 based Nova
8 ) PDC Clipper : C64 laptop. Hope to document this in a few weeks time.
9) SWTPC CT64
10) And a Lisa XL that boots 7 different operating systems from it 260 MB internal IDE harddisk. That last bit is of course a later addon, P. Schaefers IDEfile unit.
( Lisa OS3.1, OS2.0, Workshop, Macworks XL, Macworks+. Xenix 3.0, Uniplus )

AMD2901 seems to be the dominant CPU in this household !

Jos
 
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PDC Clipper : C64 laptop. Hope to document this in a few weeks time.

Oh, I'm very interested to see more info on your unit. I've seen some pics and it's truly a unique machine. I still like the SX-64 better because it's colour, but I like the form factor of the Clipper.
 
Hi,

1) Motorola MicroModule system
2) Early Intel SDK85 with an 8085, as opposed to 8085A processor
3) Early SDK86 with the black-top C8086 processor
4) Central Data 2650
5) Early IBM5150 with the expansion unit with twin full height 10Mb HDD
6) SC/MP LCDS
7) MicroProfessor MF-1P with printer, IO board and EPROM burner
8 ) Intel MCS80 (SDK80?)
9) IBM P70-D portable
10) Intel IPDS
 
I thought of another one.
NC4000 processor on a board. This was one of the early chips that Chuck Moore designed to run Forth more directly. Later variants of this chip design were on the early Mars rover. I recall that they had a 6MHz processor accelerator boards the were used to speed up 33MHz 386s, doing non-Forth application. Other than operations that had large literals or addresses, it could put 3 or 4 operations into a single instruction. It ran 3 16 bit busses at one time. It was fast.
The board is on a home brew bus with a hacked XT floppy controller and a XT hard drive controller. The hard drive is one of the original 5Meg drives that I bought cheap at a yard sale. MS made them obsolete with its newer DOS that required 10Megs minimum. I recall, I payed $5 for it. I thought I'd made such a great deal. It seemed like just a few months that new hard disk dropped below $1 a meg.
Dwight
 
I thought of another one.
NC4000 processor on a board. This was one of the early chips that Chuck Moore designed to run Forth more directly. Later variants of this chip design were on the early Mars rover. I recall that they had a 6MHz processor accelerator boards the were used to speed up 33MHz 386s, doing non-Forth application. Other than operations that had large literals or addresses, it could put 3 or 4 operations into a single instruction. It ran 3 16 bit busses at one time. It was fast.
The board is on a home brew bus with a hacked XT floppy controller and a XT hard drive controller. The hard drive is one of the original 5Meg drives that I bought cheap at a yard sale. MS made them obsolete with its newer DOS that required 10Megs minimum. I recall, I payed $5 for it. I thought I'd made such a great deal. It seemed like just a few months that new hard disk dropped below $1 a meg.
Dwight

This is a highly desirable board. I’ve checked eBay for years and they never come up.

You have a really interesting collection.
 
Once I understood how the NC4000 chip worked, I made a couple high level instructions with the low level code. Having 8 bit I/O, I needed a handy way to swap 8 bit values. I had a register at address -1, since that was an easy literal. It'd swap the 2 bytes. All done in two clock cycles. I thought that was an easy way to get bytes. The processor was so fast I had to put delays in to keep the floppy controller happy. It didn't have a chance to respond with the status otherwise. Using the hard drive, I could meta compile the entire Forth in less then 10 seconds. Not all that fast by todays standards but when one considers it was a 16 bit processor in 4K gates.
Dwight
 
I mostly focus on NeXT black hardware. I have a few things I think qualify:

Cube serial #57 with working magneto optical disk and NextStep 0.8 (Pretty much the pride of my collection). Lots of cool small details to this machine like a hand worked backplane.
Engineering sample Next non-ADB keyboard
A Turbo dimension NeXT cube
 
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